Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a server apparatus, an information processing method, and a storage medium.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, various cloud services have been provided in the Internet environment. Some cloud services collaborate to provide a new service.
Many of these services or a collaborating services employ an authentication system for security reasons. The authentication system performs access control and also performs maintenance and management of IDs and passwords. Generally, since a service user purchases only a license of the service which the user desires to use, the authentication system checks whether the user is licensed. Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-333928 discusses a service operation method that performs authentication of various services and management of licenses. According to this service, the access control is performed based on license information managed for each service. Further, availability of the use of service is controlled by the units of service.
A case where an existing cloud service A provides two new services in collaboration with other services will be explained. A new fee-based service B of the cloud service A collaborates with a service “b” and a new free service C of the cloud service A collaborates with a service “c”, according to the conventional license management, in which the user needs to be licensed before using these services. In other words, a license dedicated to the use of the fee-based service B needs to be issued for the user that desires to use the fee-based service B. According to this access control, only the user having the license can use the service. Further, as is the case with the fee-based service B, a license dedicated to the use of the free service C needs to be issued and verified. According to this license, the service “c” can be confirmed as a reliable service.
However, if the usage charge of the server cannot be recovered from the users of the free service, while issuing a dedicated license to each of the users and managing the licenses, its cost will become a significant burden on the operation. Further, since license verification is necessary even when the user uses the free service, overall performance of the cloud service is reduced.